The rapid growth will destroy your hobby by warping the culture beyond recognition and forcing you to act the their norms. I’ve seen it happen more than once.
For me it depends entirely on 1) which hobby and 2) how the mainstream audience shapes it; if investors believe they can make more money by promoting certain aspects of the hobby, they can change it’s entire landscape. And that’s not even getting into what can happen when IP law gets involved.
It’s a shitty tradeoff to have to make, because sometimes I just want to everyone to enjoy what I enjoy. I’ve also seen hobbies die from too much exposure.
There’s a podcast called Jobsolete that covers, as the name implies, obsolete jobs! It’s inactive now but they have an ok size catalog that it’s worth going back and listening.
Holy shit, is this why lowly assistants are colloquially called gophers?!? I never drew the connection. Sometime we just take weird words or phrases for granted without thinking about their etymology.
Cycling? Great, increased funding for infrastructure and increased general awareness. Amateur radio? Lower prices for rigs, innovation, and more contacts to be made.
If your interest in a hobby is based on its exclusivity, it may be that you’re more interested in exclusivity than in the hobby itself…
I think they were more likely referring to how when the public eye is on something many companies will start churning out low-effort products to capitalise on the interest. The market would be flooded with cheap and inferior products in that niche, potentially threatening the smaller business that actually cared about making quality products for those hobbyists. I know this won’t apply to every hobby, but there are definitely a number of them that will.
Well, some people don’t do well with the higher speed and more social interaction it can lead to. It doesn’t have to result in giving up that hobby, but leaving communities related to it.
It’s not that some hobbies are based on exclusivity or even some other hipster rationalization, but there definitely is a period where a shit load of new people come in, read half a wiki page, then proceed to argue and talk down to people who have been at it for years. It ruins communities if the audience widens too much at once. I’ve been online long enough to have seen it happen multiple times.
I dunno, I think my favorite insults are the ones that don’t require any creativity or effort. There is something to be said of just using the old standbys because the person you are insulting is worth so little to you that you really can’t even be assed to come up with anything specific for them, or because the subject you are insulting is so inherently devoid of originality that they’re like a negative creativity vacuum. How many different ways can you really insult the same copy-pasted balding thumb headed shrimp dick moron? It gets tough after the one thousand three hundred and twelfth time. They make writers and dominatrices to insult people, there are careers. Me, I’m not gonna waste good material if I’m not paid for it.
This works up to a certain size, then you start having to contend with more shameless money grabs, scalpers catching wind of things and making it impossible for actual fans/users of the product to get stuff for a reasonable price and more scammers.
And the opposite end of that is the corporatization of your previously small cozy wholesome authentic cottage industry sized hobby. It happened to videogames in the late 2010s.
or I think the desire to earn personal assets of that level should really be classified as a mental disease, like gambling addiction. And be treated accordingly
Reminds me of a sketch comedy video on YouTube where popeyes is scouting out a new location in the worst neighborhood possible and some gangsters threaten them at gunpoint until the popeyes employee informs him of who he is messing with.
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